More Latinos voted for Trump. Democrats need to reckon with that

Periodically, the Latinx Files will feature a guest writer. This week, we’ve asked De Los contributing columnist JP Brammer to fill in. If you have not subscribed to our weekly newsletter, you can do so here.

It’s not quite déjà vu. While there are echoes of 2016, many things are different for Democrats this time around in the brutal days following a Trump victory. There’s no cold comfort from winning the popular vote, for one, a fact that, in conjunction with a narrative of Russian election interference, inspired feelings of righteous outrage in the months after. It was much easier in 2016 to say, “This is not who we are.” 2024, in contrast, was very much a “this is who we are” kind of election, which calls for a different kind of reckoning, a decidedly more somber one.

Another thing that’s changed from 2016 is the coalition that buoyed the Republican ticket to the White House. Eight years ago, the “blame,” was placed on Rust Belt voters, voters in Appalachia, frustrated men without college degrees. The portrait of the average Trump voter was that of a disaffected, working-class white male who felt like he was losing his place in his country to immigrants, people of color and pronouns. That portrait looks different in 2024. Trump made historic inroads with voters of color, immigrants and Latinos. The two counties that swung furthest to the right are majority non-white. And as the blame game kicks into gear, it’s Latinos who are catching most of the heat.

On social media, the sense of betrayal is palpable. Jokes abound about calling ICE on Latinos in an act of revenge (undocumented people cannot vote). Unsavory as it is, the raw feelings make sense. As a bloc, Latinos have historically voted blue, and while Democrats still managed to secure a slim majority of their votes Tuesday at 53%, according to exit polls, the writing is on the wall: The Latino electorate moved right in unprecedented numbers, despite visceral rhetoric from the Trump campaign about cracking down on immigrants. Puerto Rico caught a massive stray at his Madison Square Garden rally, wherein a comedian referred to it as a “floating island of garbage,” inspiring outrage from prominent Latino figures.

It’s understandable why many Democrats would ask, “What gives?”

But much of that incredulousness stems from a framework of belief that remains popular among Democrats and progressives, one that is proving to be out of date: Essentialism, the notion that identity is intrinsic, and that it reliably informs behavior. Among the assumptions of essentialism is that experiencing any form of oppression lends people a sort of nobility, granting them powers of empathy not available to the dominant group, and an enhanced immunity to the temptations of authoritarianism. This goes a long way in explaining the outrage toward Latinos, and why the electoral blame game, which focuses on the perceived goodness of different groups of people, exists in the first place.

I’ve experienced these sentiments from my fellow progressives, who have decided that the problem has always been “white Cubans in Florida” or “machismo,” or “proximity to whiteness,” ideas that echo the prevailing talking points following Trump’s victory in 2016. White resentment for ethnic minorities got us here, and the way forward is to become an anti-racist, to signal boost marginalized voices, to champion the oppressed, which are a distinct clade from the oppressor. Certainly, not all of these instincts were bad. Marginalized people face hurdles in society that direly need to be addressed. The fact that the massive swell of white guilt failed to manifest enduring, concrete changes speaks to the hollowness of the rhetoric that defined that era.

But the assumptions that accompanied those instincts were misguided. The pairing of identity with intrinsic morality denies the reality that the message of “those people are dangerous” can be quite seductive to people from a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences, even those one might assume fall under the category of “those people.” When people feel they’re falling on hard times, they become much more susceptible to such messages. While the left was splitting hairs about finding the correct language to address marginalized individuals within marginalized groups, the right was telling them that the economy was in the toilet.

The difficult pill to swallow for many on the left is that, despite the jokes, there are actually Latinos in this country who are not white, or “white-passing” or “white-adjacent” who would quite happily call ICE on an undocumented immigrant, because they simply do not see themselves in an undocumented immigrant. There is not some special property in their blood that makes them more likely to be compassionate to this vulnerable group. There is not some piece of folk wisdom handed down over the generations, or a recognition of common roots that would make them hesitate to condemn an undocumented immigrant.

The idea that such people should see themselves in an undocumented immigrant is the sort of naive condescension that has typified the past decade of popular progressive thought, and is precisely the sort of thing that is being challenged today. In the first place, “Latino” is a massive umbrella with holes in it that’s meant to incorporate everyone from white Cuban exiles who hate leftism to Indigenous Oaxacans fleeing climate disaster. That there is an assumption in the first place that there ought to be some form of ethnic solidarity between such people is, in itself, ignorant, and a contributing factor to why so many Latinos likely feel patronized. In short, the image of a non-white person in a MAGA hat was a caricature in 2016. In 2024, they are simply “a voter.”

It’s time for progressives to acknowledge that the identity era is giving way to the ideology era, one in which people from all different ethnic backgrounds have roughly equivalent opportunities to arrive at heterodox beliefs based on how they perceive the economy, or on whatever their favorite streamer or TikToker told them, or purely on vibes, and is producing Eldritch forms of voter that we haven’t developed a vocabulary for yet, because the textbook we’re referencing is from 10 years ago.

This moment requires us to be able to acknowledge that, yes, there are significant numbers of people whom we see as minorities who do not see themselves as oppressed individuals who need assistance. These individuals are perfectly able to arrive at conclusions we don’t like, or even at conclusions that are flat out provably false, and we will not be able to persuade them otherwise by making the argument that they should not be arriving at those conclusions because of the demographic they belong to.

Essentialism can’t accommodate that sort of thing. It can’t account for the possibility that people might defy expectations. It renders different groups of people as static, unchanging, predictable organisms that are distinct from one another. It can’t fathom why a Black man would vote for Trump, why a working-class woman would be concerned with the cost of essentials, why a brown Latino who recently immigrated to the U.S. would vote to deport someone whose story and face look incredibly similar to his own. If our framework of belief can’t process people like these, then it is a framework that isn’t serving us.

Progressive policies remain popular. We don’t have to leave vulnerable groups behind to champion them. It’s not about denying that identities exist, or that oppression is real. Rather, it’s acknowledging that the membrane between oppressor and oppressed is porous, that an individual can flit quite easily between the two, and that embracing the idea that there are groups of people with innately good politics and groups of people with innately bad politics is a road to nowhere and, if anything, is merely embracing the politics of resentment that the right has down to a science.

It’s critical that we locate what’s appealing about authoritarianism so that we can properly challenge it. We are not doing so now. Although Democrats can still point to broad support from groups beyond Latinos, it’s worth remembering: they once held that broad support from Latinos. Things can change. People can change. For better or for worse.

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

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